2) the poem: Two early Greek examples are Hesiod's
Theogony and Works and Days, both from around 700 BC.
There are also a number of shorter poems by Archilochus
(Are-KILL-oh-cuss) and Sappho (SA-foe) from
the 600s BC, among others. Sappho's poems
are just about the only surviving literature by a Greek woman.

Menander

3) the play: Plays are divided into tragedies
and comedies. Tragedies are generally sad, while comedies are
funny. The oldest tragedies that we still have were written by Aeschylus around 500 BC. We also have tragedies written
by Sophocles (around 450 BC) and Euripides (around 425 BC). The oldest comedies that we still have are by Aristophanes, and were also written around 425 BC. Some later comedies were written by Menander around 350 BC. The Greeks wrote plays in verse, like poems. The plays we have are mostly the ones kids read in school (because there were more copies of them, so they were more likely to get preserved), so they're generally about serious themes, and appropriate for school - they don't have any sexy parts. Probably Greek theater also had lots of funny, R-rated plays too, but they're lost now.

4) the history:
Two major histories that we still have
are those by Herodotus and Thucydides. About 450 BC, Herodotus wrote a history of the Persian Wars. About 400 BC, Thucydides wrote a history of the Peloponnesian
War. After the Peloponnesian War, Xenophon
wrote about his adventures as a mercenary soldier for the Persians.
During the Roman takeover of Greece,
Polybius wrote a
History of Rome in Greek. Greeks wrote history in prose (not in verse).

5) philosophical dialogues and treatises:
The first
written philosophy was written by Plato
around 380 BC in the form of a kind of play,
two or more people talking to each other. Later on both Plato and his
student Aristotle wrote regular
philosophical books, in prose without dialogues.

6) legal speeches and political speeches:
The first
speeches we have surviving are from the 300s BC. The three most famous
speechwriters were Lysias , Isocrates, and Demosthenes.

Karen Eva Carr, PhD.Assoc. Professor Emerita, History
Portland State University

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Professor Carr holds a B.A. with high honors from Cornell University in classics and archaeology, and her M.A. and PhD. from the University of Michigan in Classical Art and Archaeology. She has excavated in Scotland, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, and Tunisia, and she has been teaching history to university students for a very long time.

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